Paris - France will remain at the UN racism conference in Geneva and plans to sign its concluding declaration, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Tuesday.

"Yesterday (Monday) we all left the hall together," Kouchner told Europe 1 radio, referring to the walkout of European ambassadors in reaction to comments by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about Israel. "But we are not leaving the conference."

Paris - Turkish writer Nedim Gursel is to go on trial in Ankara for insulting religious values in his latest novel, The Daughters of Allah, Gursel confirmed to the German Press Agency dpa on Friday.

"The authorities accuse me of insulting religious values and thereby being a danger to public security," Gursel said in Paris, where he is research director of comparative literature at CNRS and professor of Turkish at the Oriental Language Institute.

Paris (France), Apr. 17 : French president Nicholas Sarkozy has managed to insult three of his country''s closest allies over a brief lunch at the Elysée Palace.

Sarkozy described U S President Obama was inexperienced and badly briefed on climate change, the Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero wasn''t very clever and German Chancellor Angela Merkel did not share his foresight about how to tackle the global financial crisis.

Paris  - While US President Barack Obama is very intelligent and charismatic, he is "not always at his best when it comes to decisions and efficiency", French President Nicolas Sarkozy was quoted Thursday as saying.

"He has only been elected for two months and has never managed a ministry in his life," Sarkozy was quoted as saying by Liberation newspaper. There were things on which Obama had no opinion, he added.

Paris - French Farms and Fisheries Minister Michel Barnier said Thursday he was negotiating with other countries to obtain higher catch quotas in an effort to end a blockade of northern ports by French fishermen.

Barnier told RTL radio that he was working on exchanging quotas with other European countries to allow France's fishermen to catch more sole without surpassing EU-imposed quotas. French fishermen have already exhausted their quota for sole for 2009.

Paris  - French sailors operating from a frigate in the Indian Ocean have boarded what was described as a pirate mother-ship and arrested 11 pirates, the French Defence Ministry said Wednesday.

In the operation, which took place some 900 kilometres east of the Kenyan port of Mombasa, the sailors seized the 10-meter-long ship which was carrying a large reserve of petrol and two "assault skiffs," the ministry said in a statement.

The 11 pirates were arrested and transferred to the frigate, the Nivose.